Muddling through the white noise of news

You may have read, or even discovered for yourself, that WSN now sits among a pretty impressive list of college newspapers around the country featured in The Huffington Post's new college section. WSN's editorial board spotlighted this news last week; already, a number of our articles have made appearances in this fancy new section. For young journalists concerned about their work going unnoticed, the opportunity to be cast into a pool of publications numbering in the dozens upon dozens means potentially unheard of levels of exposure.

We are excited.

But there are questions to be asked here, I think, about the ever expanding network of online pods any given reader falls into. Should YOU be excited about this?

NYU already has a pretty varied and accomplished list of media outlets for the discerning consumer to pull from. There's WSN, our tried and true daily; NYU Local, the new(er) blog on the block; NYU Livewire, a supposed collection of our journalism department's best student work; and a veritable cornucopia of New York City publications such as The Times, Village Voice and Daily News. Beyond these, Facebook status updates and Twitter tweets round up a pretty exhaustive pool of news sources for a reader to swim around in.

Most journalism students will probably agree that new media means a flood of information on a minute-to-minute basis. We should all celebrate this emerging age of the everyman journalist, a time in which everything is just a Google search away and our networks are linking up such that anyone can hyperlink surf his way to the big picture. The Huffington Post's college section represents another link in the chain — a way for NYU readers to access the most important headlines, nationwide, for undergrads beyond our campus.

And that's pretty sweet, for those of us concerned enough to read about the napping craze at The Ohio State University. How many of us can that be, though? At the risk of sounding like a Foundations of Journalism essay, might all of this amount to a bunch of white noise?

Chances are, a lot of us barely absorb all the news available to us about NYU alone. As students in the city, we're pretty flooded with information as it is. While the opportunity provided by The Huffington Post to broaden our horizons even more is fantastic in theory, how do you get the average NYU student — brains bloated with news items on Abu Dhabi and residence halls and snow days and displaced bagpipers — to make practical use of these stories?

It's probably been posited by minds greater than my own that this wall of information might actually discourage readers from bothering to begin with. We're tired of news before we move beyond our e-mail.

As a writer and editor, I'm ecstatic about this new frontier, the quaking emergence of the almighty Omnijounalism. But it's kind of my job to make use of this stuff.

My question, I suppose, is this: Will you?